Why It's a Great Time to Be a Reader

It is exactly four years since Amazon
shipped the first Kindle readers, priced at $399. Skepticism about the
prospects for the digital devices was widespread. Those doubts have long since
been replaced by fierce competition for preeminence among Apple (iPads), Barnes
& Noble (the Nook), and now the Kindle Fire. With a seven-inch color touch
screen and a retail price of $199, the Kindle Fire is $50 less than B&N's comparable
high-resolution color touch screen Nook, and $300 less than Apple's iPad 2. The
Nook and the Kindle Fire have many, but by no means all the the features of the
iPad--neither has a camera, Bluetooth, or GPS, and both have fewer apps--but if
you are primarily a reader or viewer and want Wi-Fi access to books (along with
movies, music, and some games), these readers provide what you need and are
only going to add capacity as each device is unveiled.

The unquestioned
winners in the competition are consumers, because the prices of books have been
driven down and the selection material now available is enormous. Edward Baig,
a personal tech columnist for USA Today concluded that both the Nook and
Kindle Fire are appealing, "especially if what you have in mind for a tablet is
reading (traditional strengths for Amazon and Barnes & Noble); listening to
music, watching movies and TV shows (including Adobe Flash sites); playing
casual games and checking e-mail." Amazon's vast resources of content, which
now include the $79 a year Amazon Prime service that enables streaming of
movies and television, plus a controversial e-book rental program, give it an
edge. B&N still has hundreds of brick and mortar stores and seems to be
preparing to bundle e-books with printed copies as an additional incentive.In many respects,
today's book buying process is still a familiar one: the fundamental choice now
is whether to read in print or on a hand-held device. Based on reviews,
publicity, and prior experience with the author, reading groups, and that
trusty perennial--word of mouth--you select a book and then a means of delivery.
The greatest challenge confronts traditional booksellers as they devise the
means to supply e-books to customers who could download from Apple, Amazon, or B&N
in less than a minute.

At the National Book Awards ceremony last week, in
accepting the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary
Community, Mitchell Kaplan, proprietor of Miami's Books & Books and founder
of the Miami Book Fair International, now in its 28th year, addressed
the issue of bookstores' added value head on:

I stand shoulder to shoulder with
booksellers everywhere, who are doing the same work in their communities... Writers are writing marvelous books. Readers want to read and find them... We
need to reassert the place of the bookseller... Our challenge today is to
figure out how to solve the complex distribution issues that have arisen in the
world we live in.

The millions of
digital readers already in circulation with many more to follow highlight, as
Kaplan declared, the degree to which a consequence of the digital age has been
to make the publishing industry itself more complicated. For generations,
authors went to publishers and made a deal to be edited, produced, and
marketed. Depending on the genre and stature, authors received advances, and
the publishers' goal was to sell enough copies to earn back the investment. The
other option was known as "vanity" publishing, in which the author paid for the
privilege of seeing their work in print and a small number of companies
provided the essential manufacturing.

Nowadays, the options
for how to launch a book and the ways it will be distributed have expanded to
the point that it is hard to keep up. Works of such venerable authors as
William Styron and Leon Uris are reappearing in e-books for the first time.
Books that were long out of print are being revived. Print-on-Demand (POD) machines
like the Espresso are turning up in leading bookstores such as Denver's
Tattered Cover, Manchester, Vermont's Northshire, and Washington's Politics and
Prose, and can produce books one at a time or in small quantities. In-store POD
is on the verge of a breakthrough that could prove critical to booksellers, who
also can provide content to selected digital readers. There are also now about
two dozen relatively large subsidy publishers that provide their authors a menu
of services--the cost to authors for these services can run into thousands of
dollars, but they assure that the book will be made available. This is no
longer derided as "vanity publishing"; instead, at its best for authors and
booksellers alike, it has the benefits of entrepreneurship. One of the larger
of these enterprises, Author Solutions, has a number of imprints, including
AuthorHouse, iUniverse, and Xlibris, and according to its website, has released
nearly 140,000 titles. In the New York Review of Books, there are as
many as eight pages of ads in color for Author Solutions featuring these books
in a variety of formats: paperback, hardcover, and e-books.

It is hard to imagine
that any publisher would not pursue digital initiatives, given the speed with
which they are being adopted, but like the booksellers, they also confront
distribution and production challenges that are formidable. If the past is a
useful guide, there will be continued dynamic change, with winners among them--the
iPad, Nook, Kindles, Canadian-based Kobo, POD machines, and such innovators as
Mitchell Kaplan--and losers, the most spectacular case being the collapse of
Borders in 2011, which sharply reduced the retail shelf space and thus further increased
the appeal of e-books. What we can say with certainty is that the
transformation of publishing currently under way has demonstrated the viability
of books in the digital age. And that is definitely good news.